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SYCORAX PINE "I have no more ambition for this book
than that some day someone will be lying in bed
and read out a single line
- and that their companion will turn away from them in silence..."
- Don Paterson, "The Book of Shadows" ~

Last night I donned my best 40s dress and ventured forth for a party. It wasn't until I was halfway down Farfara Way (our steep and endless driveway) that I realized that the fog had rolled in. As I made my white-knuckled way along the half hour of coastal roadway, I became, really, quite a connoisseur of fog. There's the spectral mist that makes you feel like you may be driving straight through faded imprints of another time, the clinging fog that whirls around you as you flee its longing affections, and of course the pea soup fog that makes you hope you know the driveway's turns and ditches by heart, lest you become a spectral imprint before your time. What should my eerie iPod choose as the ideal accompaniment to such a wooded, murky venture, lit only by noirish sweeps of headlight?

So Hitchcockian was the moment that I began to laugh uncontrollably, by my lonesome, crouched squinting over the steering wheel of the Barge She Sat In (which is, um, the name of our new {blush, shamefaced eye aversion} SUV). Then I stopped abruptly: Pull it together, Sycorax, I told myself. This cackling isn't improving the ambiance.